At All Costs

"I think Oversteegen's onto something, Ma'am," Michelle Henke told Dame Alice Truman.

"But how could they have moved them without Sturgis' arrays seeing them?" Truman's question was thoughtful, not dismissive.

"Very carefully," Henke replied dryly. Truman made a face, and Henke chuckled humorlessly.

"Seriously, Ma'am," she went on, after a moment, "think about it. Whoever this is, she's cool enough, and she's thought far enough ahead, to get her mobile units-aside from her LACs-into stealth before our arrays found her. Personally, I'm betting she did it as soon as her sensors picked up Greyhound and Whippet's hyper footprints. And I'm also betting she'd already decided what she was going to do with her pods if it came to it. So what she's probably been doing is quietly using some of that near-planet 'merchant traffic' Sturgis reported to pick up and drop off previously deployed pods. If she did, I think we need to rethink our recon doctrine."

"Go ahead and park one or two in close and just let them sit?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

Henke didn't mention that she'd already suggested that modification only to have the Powers That Were at Admiralty House shoot it down. They were concerned that a stationary platform would be more readily tracked down, especially since it would be inside most of the system's defenders' surveillance platforms, which would give them a far better chance of detecting the array's directional transmissions and triangulating on their source. Having the arrays localized and destroyed would have been bad enough, but the present generation of recon drones had all the Ghost Rider bells and whistles, including the very latest grav-pulse coms and several other goodies Erewhon had never had to turn over to Haven in the first place. The possibility that one of them might be disabled without being destroyed, while slight, did exist, and Admiralty House strongly objected to the notion of handing the Star Kingdom's latest and best hardware to the other side for examination.

"I think you were probably right all along, Mike," Truman said after a moment. "Certainly, if they did what Oversteegen thinks they did, having a couple of platforms-or even just one-keeping a close, permanent eye on near-planet space would probably've caught them at it."

"Maybe. The question, though, Ma'am, is what we do about it," Henke pointed out.

"Well, I see two possibilities. First, we send in the LACs. That means radically slowing your ships' approach while Scotty and his LAC jockeys get themselves organized and catch up with you. Second, we go right on doing what we're doing. Which do you vote for?"

"A variant of Option Two," Henke said without any appreciable hesitation. "I don't want to waste any more time than we have to, since we don't know where any response force they've sent for is coming from, or exactly how long it's going to take to get here. What I propose is that I send the Katanas ahead to catch up with Oversteegen. Hopefully, the bad guys won't have guessed we've taken a page from their own missile-defense doctrine, but whether they have or not, forty-eight Katanas should help out quite a bit."

"I don't know, Mike," Truman said dubiously. "Scotty would only need a couple of hours more than Oversteegan to get there, and Shrikes and Ferrets are a lot harder targets for their fire control than battlecruisers."

"And a lot easier to kill if they get hit," Henke pointed out. "Besides, we're already inside their powered missile envelope, if they're where we think they are. At the moment, they're not firing because we're still closing, and they're willing to wait until we give them better firing solutions. But if we suddenly break off, they're going to fire anyway, well before we could get a LAC strike in close enough to start killing platforms. Since we've already stepped into their parlor, I think our best chance is to just keep going, offer Oversteegen as the most attractive target, and back him up with the best missile-defense capability we can."

Truman thought some more. Then she nodded, once, sharply.

"All right, Mike. Do it."

"They've definitely figured out roughly what we're doing with our main combatants, Ma'am," Leonardo Erickson said. He tapped the projected vectors CIC was throwing into the master plot. "Look at this."

The four squadrons of LACs which had been glued tightly to the second Manty battlecruiser division were accelerating away from it, closing rapidly on the lead division. At the same time, some of the near-planet sensor platforms were begi

"So," she said flatly, "the question is whether we fire now, when it's pretty clear they haven't quite locked in our positions, or wait a little longer in hopes of improving our firing solutions. Opinions, anyone?" She looked up from the plot. "Ivan?"

"Wait," Commander deCastro said, quickly and positively. She cocked an eyebrow, and he shrugged. "We're so outgu

"I see. Leonardo?" she looked at her ops officer.

"Normally, I'd tend to agree with Ivan," Erickson said after a moment. "But I don't like this." He indicated the steadily accelerating icons of the enemy LACs once more. "They've been careful to keep them between our known LAC concentrations and the rest of their ships. To me, that suggests they're probably Katanas in the escort role. But now they're sending them in along with their probe, and I'm wondering if they've evolved something like our LAC fleet missile-defense doctrine. If they have, then the people we're going to have the improved firing solutions on are also going to've significantly improved their defenses by the time we finally fire."

"On the other hand, Ma'am," deCastro pointed out, "the closer they get to us, the further they are from their main body. And if they are a sizable chunk of the Manties' Katana force, mousetrapping them now might be the best thing we could do. Especially since they also seem to've completely missed Mirror Box."

Je

"We wait," she said. "Not as long as you'd probably like, Ivan, but long enough for our solutions to tighten up. I think we'll wait until their Katanas-and I think you're right about what they are, Leonardo-are about ten minutes from matching vectors with their battlecruisers. I'd actually have liked to catch them close enough to engage our missiles with their counter-missiles but still too far out to use their laser clusters, but that's not going to work, given the geometry. I think we'll go with a staggered launch, though."

"Staggered, Ma'am?" Erickson repeated.

"The first one to concentrate on their battlecruisers," she said, with a thin smile. "I'll want it heavy enough to get their attention pretty emphatically, too. Particularly, I'd like their Katanas to commit as many as possible of their counter-missiles to stopping the first wave."